After the theme of WordPress has been customized to your own design, you are about to start blogging regularly. However you should also consider to optimize your WordPress blog so as to get indexed and rank better in search engines. Let’s see what can be done something about search engines optimization on WordPress blog.

WordPress Permalink SEO Optimization

The default WordPress permalink is using the ID of each post, for example:

http://www.YourDomainName/?p=1

The permalink of WordPress blog is shown in the diagram below:

The post id is just a number, without any meaning. As we know spiders of search engines love to eat words, and that is the way how web pages and blogs on the Internet are indexed and ranking.

The URLs of web pages and blogs weight an important factor in search engines ranking. Therefore the URL of your blog should contain keywords, keywords related with the contents, and not number.

Let’s see how the post id can be replaced with keywords of URL of WordPress blog.

The WordPress permalink can be modified in the Admin Control Panel under the Settings Menu (Dashboard -> Settings -> Permalink) as shown in the diagram below.

As we can see the default permalink is:

?p=postID

WordPress allows custom structure of permalink. Obviously, there are two possible options:

  • include the post name or post title only, or
  • include both category name and post name

Let’s see what’s the difference between the above two options:

Include Post Name in Permalink

Enter the following in the field of Custom Structure:

/%postname%/

The post name now include in the URL of each post as shown in the diagram below:

Include Category and Post Name in Permalink

This is also a good idea to include the Category and Post Name in Permalink of WordPress blog. This can be done by entering the following in the field of Custom Structure:

/%category%/%postname%/

The category and post name now include in the URL of each post as shown in the diagram below:

Choose either option suitable for your blog. Remember that the keywords close to the beginning of URL weight more.

This is the end of WordPress Permalink optimization.